The other side

'What the smelter, smith and alchemist have in common is that all three lay claim to a particular magico-religious experience in their relations with matter; this experience is their monopoly and its secret is transmitted through the initiatory rites of their trades. All three work on a Matter which they hold to be at once alive and sacred, and in their labours they pursue the transformation of matter, its perfection and transmutation.'  -  M. Eliade

The iron-working smith is shaped by their relationship with a material that often develops into a philosophy of experience indelibly changed by the idea of iron. The bladesmith, arguably more than most other smiths, works to push the limits of iron and steel, delving deep into their genetic attributes and attempting to alter them to their own ends: supernatural standards of hardness, flexibility, complexity and beauty.

The blacksmith is concerned primarily with form; the bladesmith as well, but just much with substance. The material of both smiths starts with the iron-maker smelting from ores, but the blade-maker must understand these processes from start to finish. What goes into the creation of steel, what goes into working it in time and temperature, form and finish is imperative in every measure. The standards of what a blade is and does are at once vague and very specific. For every blade that has ever been made, the process is complex; similar yet different every time, and ultimately concerns the learned transformation of materials in a seemingly magical, elemental transformational process. 

The natural state of iron on earth is transformation into iron oxides, or rust. More than any other kind of smith, the bladesmith is very much concerned with reversing this process.This reversal is the process whereby iron is made from ores in the smelter's furnace; it is when firescale is scraped off to foster forge-welds. Reduction is the opposite of oxidation. Rust is the foe of the finished object as well, destroying beauty and function at once. As long as a blade is being created and used, growing and living, its makers and users fight against oxygen's effects.  They scrub with stones and oils to preserve the substance, and preserve the form by sighting down lines to make sure they are true. 

Until its day comes. Until the yarns of its fate have run off the spindle, as does that of every named thing. If it has a name, it has a purpose and it has a life. These must end. Just because a thing does not breathe with lungs does not mean it escapes the jurisdiction of time; its numbered breaths are on a different measure. All things of this earth are constantly in flux: we are growing, as we age; we die as we age, and why would we think that the state of death is permanent either? It is another passage which we cannot choose to avoid, through which we must change like any other passage. It is a process of initiation and transformation. 

A blade is true, a blade is sharp, a blade shines with the light of day. Until its time as a blade is over. Then there is another initiation, another transformation, to ready it for the next world. 

When our time-yarn runs out, we are surrounded by those who know the meaning of our name and who would see us out of this world into what lies next. In our ships, in our coffins, they prepare us to pass the gates. With ritual, with love, care, duty, and sacrifice, they destroy us. They surrender us to the elements; fire, water, earth, or open air: these will each break us down into what the earth loaned us, the corporal vessels our souls borrowed, and we will become the soil and water that sustained our bodies and will sustain those of our children's children. They will eat of our bodies and drink of our blood, and we will live on in them even as we fare out onto planes they only dream on. 

Our rituals are prayers for growth, for birth, for seed, for strength. Time will not yield these without proper sacrifice. We must sow now if we are to reap later. We must give ourselves to the earth for our offspring to grow and live their days. We must carefully and sacredly cultivate growth and creation. To do that, we must observe and venerate rituals of destruction and decay, recognizing it as absolutely an equal process. This is the basis of all physics and chemistry; this is the basis of all alchemy and magic. They are all based on the same rule, which transcends and permeates all systems. 

 A smelter and a smith will spend a lifetime honing their skills at the reduction of iron oxides into iron; the perfecting of alloys; the treatment of steel; the exhibition of perfect substance, beautiful patterns, natural and intended (always a blend of both). There is a reason the grain of wood and the flow of rivers manifest themselves in the patterns of steel. There are sacred, underlying patterns at work: call them mathematics, call them intelligent design: they are the same. It is to these patterns, likewise superimposed on time, that we and our objects must be surrendered. 

Creation is a science, an art, a ritual: all of these and never just one. There is an entire other side it relies on: destruction. All elemental bodies composed with a soul and traveling under a name are subject to the cycles of nature and time. Destruction is likewise a science; why not a ritual? Why not an art? 

Is rusting not as fruitful a process as smelting? In truth it is; without rust, there would be nothing to smelt. The birth of iron lies in its own death, as with anything else. Why is bending not as beautiful as straightening? It is, when it is intentional. The smith spends a lifetime perfecting form and finish. But straightness and shine are not forever; neither should they be. The time must come when the passing of a threshold necessitates further change of form and substance. Iron must become rust. A blade must become not a blade. The cycle cannot be broken. 

And so we worship creation and destruction in equal measure. We rejoice in birth and mourn in death, and cannot have one without the other. Likewise our iron comes tearing into the world from the dark mother in a storm of flames and air, and we surrender it to her deep earth and roaring waters, like we do our own shells when our souls have flown. There are patterns at play in the movements of stars and planets, in the lay of soils and rivers, in the lives of people and things. We have honored these since we first could in whatever ways we know, and it is not time to stop.

Stefen's Sax

I made this sax for a great scholar and friend of mine.  He is well learned in much of the old lore as well as experienced in new systems of numerical mysticism and esoteric lock-making and lock-breaking. The runes on the scabbard name this sax his, and I know he will treasure it. This blade is work of mine from long ago, but it has a place to go and I will see it there. 

The blade is the first multi-bar I forged on my own, a year and a half ago, after my very first with Owen Bush.  The handle I made under the learned eye of Petr Floriánek, of brass and elk antler and centuries-submerged bog oak.  The grooves in the blade I cut by hand and the brass engravings as well. 

The carvings, engravings, and leather toolings are all motifs inspired by the rich and majestic material culture of the Wends, known in their native tongue as Vendels, a prosperous but mysterious flourish in the history of Scandinavia.  The silent eyes of hoary-bearded men stare out from their artifacts; they need not the written word for you to know of their might.  Written on their very war-gear is the evidence of the sway they held when they walked this earth, and knowing their names or not, you will remember them. 

Winter's Work

When December came, I left the lively glow of University for the snowy sleep of my childhood home in New Hampshire.  In a place where nothing seems to change and the weathered timbers of hand-built houses measure their breaths with the expansion and contraction of seasons, I had neither workshop nor means to get from place to place other than my boots.  I spent many of those short daylight hours alongside the river, in the woods, and by the fire.  After many months of movement, action, and decision-making, the time had come for reflection and, hopefully, the tying-up of loose ends.

I was, however, unable to resist some projects.  Sewing, leather tooling, and a little carving and sanding remained within my grasp, and I was able to make some small progress on the projects I had brought with me, as well as some new ones:

My westernized take on the Persian kard I made in Boston in the spring was now housed in a scabbard of cherry wood encased in leather I tooled simply and sewed and wrapped with waxed flax-thread.  The antler handle now worn smooth and dark stood out against the truer white of the ice and snow along the yet-unfrozen Contoocook River. 

What more?  October had seen me take a rough-ground blade to the West Coast for a great gathering of smiths, where it was hardened and tempered, and brought  back with a great deal of knowledge and inspiration from craftspeople of all backgrounds.  Now back in my native New England I had finished the blade and begun to hilt it with American walnut and a cast-off deer antler my dad found in the woods.  Here are some pictures I took in the school workshop:

The farriers' rasps my uncle had given me the previous year went to good use and gave me a beautiful pattern. 

Pencil marks preceded carving and dying, and the fitting of fittings.  

Design and heavy work finished, I took my blade home with me to my world of books, windows, and woods.  Here is where it began to take its final shape and a life of its own. 

That blade still waits to reveal its own story, and that's for another time.  The other blade weighing on and illuminating my mind was another I had forged in Boston and done more work on elsewhere.  Hardened with the more or less traditional Japanese method under the instruction of Matt Venier of Venier Forge and demonstrator at Hampshire College in November, its spirit shows through in the hamon: the ethereal hardness line reminiscent of clouds and lightening at once:

The day I etched it, this blade said something to a dear friend of mine who has just gained a degree and a great deal of opportunities.  I felt it wasn't my place to stand between them, and my progress on the blade continues with his name on it.  This one has been telling me what it wants, or perhaps what he wants, but it's led me to my first handle of birch bark, among other firsts:

She too has much more to reveal to me, and so does the winter.

Fall 2013 Demos at Hampshire College

You may or may not have gathered that I attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is a beautiful, wonderful school between fields and forests that I'm so fortunate to attend, and beyond lucky that I can simultaneously study history, mythology, and archaeology, as well as practice the crafts that I love with my whole heart.  It's actually unbelievable, but I try not to walk around smacking myself in the head out of incredulity and instead make the most of it. 

Don the 18th century sutler!

We have an incredibly well-equipped and accessible fabrication shop, which in particular houses a wonderful array of smithing tools in good shape, thanks to our legendary shop-master Don Dupuis.  In some ways, I might say "you've probably worked with someone like him", if you've spent any time working with craftspeople or in any kind of shop where people care about their work.  On the other hand, I'd also say that you've very rarely met anyone like him.  I'm so grateful for the support and encouragement I've received almost constantly over the past three years, but his has been some of the most constant and welcome.  He's absolutely awesome.  He'll give you anything you need and answer any question, but he'll do it in a way that makes you figure it our for yourself at the same time.  He's one of those.  He's a great teacher and a great friend, and he'll always be those to me.

Don holding a spring fuller for Jack McAuliffe

Thanks to him, our shop is great and we have a strong blacksmithing collective which buys most of our equipment and materials with school funding (awesome).  Our freedom and opportunity is rare and almost unheard of, but the trade-off is that we as a group need to teach ourselves most skills.  That's a wonderful way to learn, but for my own part, mentorship and teacher-student relationships are hugely important in craft, and community is one of my favorite things about it.  So, I've taken the initiative to contact several local smiths and bring them into our shop to do paid demonstrations, so the Hampshire blacksmiths can absorb skills, witness the techniques of experienced craftspeople, and network in person.  It's what makes this such a real and rewarding practice: sharing work and ideas with other people and riding the wave of collective creativity.  It's one of those few things in life that's both addictive and can't do you any wrong.

Derek addressing our small group of smiths!

So, the first person I contacted to come and teach our group is Derek Heidemann, owner & operator of Resurrection Ironworks in Millbury, Massachusetts.  He's only a few years older than me but he pulls weight with the old guys.  He's been a blacksmith at Old Sturbridge Village for a long time, and when it comes to the accurate production of 18th and 19th century tools and hardware, I'd say his work is not only of incredible quality and execution but also distinctive in its style, which is definitely something to say about someone who's in their mid-20s!  The first demo he came to do was a rose-head nail-making demo, which was impressive in his efficiency, accuracy and speed, but also marvelous in his exhibition of toolmaking: his steeled wrought iron nail header is not only a beautiful take on an historical object but also a fully functional and intuitive tool.  That's pretty representative of Derek's work: he loves old things because they work, not just because they're old, and he knows how to bring both of those out in beautiful harmony.  

Derek's custom tongs

Last year I contracted him to come for a nail-making demo, just to sort of get used to the shop and feel out the whole situation.  This time, we planned a little better, invited more people, and did something a little more exciting: tong-forging.  He brought an impressive array of tongs, all of which he had made, and in a fast, controlled, and coherent demo, he forged a pair of tongs in front of the small assembly, taking care to explain the objective and parameters of each step, and the anatomy of the product: jaws, reins, and rivet.  Derek is an excellent teacher and craftsperson, and I'm always happy to share a shop with him, absorb his experience, and share his unquenchable spirit of pursuing the craft and having a good time doing it.  

Explaining Japanese geometry

Our next demonstrator this month was Matt Venier of Lancaster, MA.  I met him in March at Baltimore Knife & Sword's Fire and Brimstone hammer-in, and was blown away with his intense attention to detail in the Japanese tradition, his great presence, and his proximity to my home (but wished I'd known he was driving instead of paying for the train ticket!  Oh well, I love trains)!  His exploration of Japanese blade geometry is exciting and honestly tempts me, but his primary pursuit is the elusive hamon: the ethereal line between the hardened martensitic edge steel and the unhardened spine.  Being among a student body interested in blades and certainly enchanted by the legendary Japanese aesthetic, and knowing Matt's passionate knowledge about it, I thought a demo on heat-treatment and a Japanese-style take on aestheticizing it would be perfect.

Applying clay for differential hardening & hamon!

So that's what we agreed on, and showed up with his whole home-made heat-treating arsenal: a furnace made from an old propane take with two strategically placed thermocouples, a horizontal quench tank filled with Parks 50 fast-quench oil, a small clamp table for blades and a few jars of black Rutland furnace cement.  With these tools, he taught us how to prepare the blade for claying, how to clay it for basic function, and how to augment it to achieve certain aesthetic details in the hamon.  Under his direction, each of us who had blades ready for heat treatment clayed up and hardened them.  His strong working knowledge of the properties and behavior of certain steels is very valuable and resulted in a beautiful hamon on my blade (I was using Aldo's 1095), but unfortunately some of the blades were mystery steels and we had to just sort of wing it.  Some still got some activity, some didn't, but overall it was a massively informative and clarifying demonstration, especially for those who had never heat treated before at all.  Matt's demo was an awesome follow-up to Derek's, in that he's an equally talented craftsperson working in almost exactly the same materials but with entirely different objectives and pertinent knowledge sets.  Having these two demos back to back really displayed the harmony and discrepancy between blacksmithing and bladesmithing, and the exciting and compelling levels one can pursue them to.

Jack talking with Brendan and Paolo in the background

Our third and final demonstrator this month was one of my oldest friends, Jack McAuliffe of Worcester, MA, where he bases his bladesmithing/teaching endeavor Underhill Edge. Recently, he's been bravely and successfully exploring the making, refining, and forging of metallurgically historical steels, particularly his own hearth-melted steels with varying levels of carbon.  This lends an intimately historical knowledge to his work like Derek's, but in a different way: not only is he incredibly faithful to historical construction but also to vital material, giving him an intensely real idea of the techniques and frustrations of the ancient smith whose work is he is trying to emulate.  Working mostly in charcoal and coke forges with primeval materials, Jack's experience of welding and pattern-welding is ingrained and he had much to share.

Straightening a 6-bar hearth steel spatha

His demo focused on the techniques for forming traditional weld joints and ensuring their success.  He went over steels for welding in historical tools, material and forge preparation for welding, the use and behavior of flux, how to know when you are ready to weld, setting and finishing the weld, which weld joints require certain hammering,  how to know if your weld failed and how to save it if you can.  He demonstrated butt-welds, lap-welds, scarf-welds, and billet-folding, and talked about twisting laminated bars, multi-bar construction, and the consequences of weld failure, which is not a pretty sight!

This demo was, in the words of friend and fellow student Paolo, "quite the game-changer" for those who have forged but never forge-welded.  I'm probably a bit biased in that it's the basis of all my ironwork, but on all account's he's right.  To be able to almost indiscriminately bond immovable pieces of incredibly strong material into bigger or more specialized shapes is beyond useful: it's magical, and no matter how much I learn about it, my wonder and enchantment only increases.  Magic and science are not mutually exclusive; I think that from the vantage point of the human experience, they rely on each other and cannot exist without some measure of the other. 

Endless thanks to all these awesome people for sharing coming and sharing their knowledge, experience, and excitement, which we can all feed off and become inspired by!  Also I want to acknowledge how unbelievably awesome all the Hampshire blacksmiths are: Sam, Andi, Peter, Emiliano, James, Paolo, Brendan, Rhett, Allxie, and just everyone else who's in the shop all the time: damn, you are cool people to work around.  Definitely good looking folks all around, too.

But to Don, I don't think any of us would be sharing this space, community, and thirst for knowledge if it wasn't for you.  Thanks from all of us, students and friends past, present & future. 

Oakland Axe 'n Sax-In

First: many thanks to Jim Austin and John Page for letting me use their photographs.  

In the fantasy-land of California, between the Great Bay and the Hills, there lies Oakland, and in it the Shangri-La of shops, to my mind: Alchemy Metalworks, where James Austin grapples with metal and the higher meaning of materiality.  It was here, in his incredible shop-creation and presence, along with that of Jeff Pringle, where I first witnessed serious and passionate craftsmanship that has affected the whole course of my life since. 

My feet having tread the pathways of the space many times, my eyes having gazed upward so many hours at the dust-motes drifting wearily in the light-shafts of the ceiling windows, for all the world like a forest of cement and steel, chipped and ancient paint replacing bark, but clean in the way a forest is before autumn.  It was in this familiar place, where I first discovered the many-fold transformation of elements within my power, one day in October, a number of individuals from all over the world gathered to feel the same thing in their own way and communicate it through a common tongue. 

Petr's excellent design

Though I wax poetic, the Oakland Axe n’ Sax-In 2013 was a specific enough event on paper.  Few will argue that Jim Austin’s work in re-creating the Viking-period axe-forging process is unparalleled in its results, based only on his examination and rumination on original artifacts with Jeff Pringle, and his experience with traditional forging techniques.  It was only fitting that he host the event and hold forth on the subject into which he has such respectable insight.
idea was a celebration of the making of the two most unique, fascinating, and beautiful feats of Iron-Age Germanic metalwork: the axe and the sax.

As for the other focus of the event, I have spent much time meditating on the sax and its implications as an object in Iron-Age Germanic society, but the bottom line is that the ubiquitous freeman’s war-knife is basically a simple, wonderful, and broad playground for discovering historical pattern-welding techniques, experimenting with historical blade steels, and familiarizing oneself with historical forging geometry, finish, and much more.  That’s why sax-forging is such a rich and exciting field for me, and is a great skill-builder with a higher success rate than sword-forging, at least where I am. 

So the idea for the whole event was that a number of presenters, experts in their creative areas from Canada, Europe, and the whole US, would lecture/present/demonstrate for the attendees something they could get from nowhere else.  The first to present was Owen Bush, with whom I first learned pattern-welding techniques, an Englishman and peerless blade-maker, whose recent years of research have focused in great part on the historical pattern-welded sax, primarily in his native Anglo-Saxon broken-back style.  His presentation was in two parts: in the first he want over basic sax recognition skills, and the history of his own work on it, and introduced a particularly interesting original piece in the British Museum he aimed to loosely re-create.  The second half of his demonstration (on the final day) was forging this technically difficult and creatively challenging composite piece before our enchanted eyes.

The next presenter on the list was Petr Floriánek, that library of historical art styles and their material contexts, again someone I have visited abroad.  His scholarship focused on Iron-Age Germanic ornament and how it was traditionally applied to historical media, such as the carving, chipping, and scraping of antler and wood, the pressing of foil into dies to make pressblech, engraving, and much more.  He gave a chronological run-down of art styles from the beginning of Germanic art to the end of the Viking Age (roughly 300-1100 CE).  He also tag-teamed a presentation with Jake Powning on “decoding” Germanic abstract ornament, revealing ways in which one can scan for clues, for familiar shapes, that reveal the form of the whole hidden within the flowing lines.  One of the most interesting insights he shared was the method of thinking about the abstraction-of-form based ornament as a language, with vocal landmarks you can watch out for, just like in the structure of speech, from which you can make constructional headway to learn it.  For example, he pointed out similar portrayals of eyes, jaws, and hip joints in earlier art, and the application of tongues, tendrils, and other extremities in later art, and how their integration is the same but the styles themselves have completely different soundscapes, so to speak. 

There was also Jeff Pringle, whose extensive collection and long study of individual artifacts for personal examination and discovery has led to a truly deep insight into the intangible "authenticity" aspect, which is well-reflected in his own work. He spoke of how we examine original artifacts; what they tell us and what they don't tell us.  A piece tells us exactly what what the product of a smith's work was.  A corpus of work tells us what norms, trends, and anomalies existed over a given period or in a given area, provided they have some sort of correlation.  But there is more that the objects imply that is less straightforward.  For instance, types and amounts of material tell what was scarce or difficult to make, like ratio or iron to steel.  Overall, we can surmise that in the past material culture we were concerned with, labor was very cheap and materials were very expensive.  As someone who has witness his share of iron-making (with Jeff), I can tell you that even for the most experienced, it's a laborious and expensive process.

With this in mind about the material culture at hand, Jeff went on to address the research of originals: there are archaeological reports, many made between 1890 and 1950, published in Danish or German and accompanied by line drawings of varying accuracy.  These can be helpful or misleading when you are researching an object.  Another important concept Jeff covered was this: original artifacts exude a power over us, because they are material, empirical evidence of past persons, with whom we as smiths or makers or anyone who uses tools or as humans in general have a connection, which is alive in the piece, in the material, which has not changed since we first learned to work it.  Finally, he addressed the issue of blade culture and continuity, which is an important thing to consider.  He compared Japan, where swords and their making have remained culturally important continuously, as opposed to their complete oblivion in the West.  But there is an in-between: he had a beautiful pattern-welded spear in a very Viking-style, expertly made and highly functional with visible but cosmetic imperfections.  It was made in the Philippines in the past century. Just like the living tradition of bloomery smelting in western Africa, these new but undeniably original artifacts are miraculous windows to the past, even though they were made a thousand years and thousands of miles from our area of study.  That is the beautiful universality of iron. 

 Jake Powning contributed to Petr's first presentation, but had two of his own to execute.  His first was a deeply needed and captivating examination of, in his own words, "the world the axe and sax came from".  In my work, I try to remember that what I'm making is not strictly mine; it belongs to another time, another place, and what I'm trying to make is something that would have been made by someone with an entirely different mindset, an entirely different worldview.  He shed light on who would have used axes and saxes, by surveying what we know about class and weapon ownership from legal documents, literary references, and grave excavations.  He questioned our perceptions about warrior status, addressing the Anglo-Saxon linguistic distinction between "wæpnman" and "wīfman" (weapon-person and weaving-person, the latter which gave us the words "wife" and "woman"), which was a genderless dichotomy (man: person, cf. modern German man: one), the fact that swords, axes, and saxes are present in the graves of both men and women, just as with what is called a "weaving-sword", a wooden or bone slat for ramming down the weft into the warp.  He talked about who the smith might have been in Germanic society, respected for his skill but feared for his power, valued but stigmatized.  Jake went on to regale us with his own re-tellings of the Lay of Volund and the story of Sindri and Brokk, smithing tales both, and laid into us with magical storytelling, capped off with his own breathtaking illustrations.  It was transformative.  He continued with the tooling of the leather scabbard of a beautiful little broken-back seax he forged, for use in his demo and then to auction off for the benefit of the event!   

 

There were three more demos: the forging demonstrations of Jim Austin and Owen Bush, an axe and a sax, respectively, and the antler handle-carving of Petr Floriánek.  The impact of witnessing the making of these three master craftspeople is honestly too complex to explain here, and I will let pictures speak in what two-dimensional way they can. 

Hearth Melting / Axe Modeling with Jack McAuliffe!

Me striking for Jack in his Worcester, MA shop

Alright so Jack McAuliffe and I go way back.  We grew up in the same little town in New Hampshire, and the first conversation we ever had was in 4th grade when we made a deal to build a lightsaber together.  "We've got all the parts.  We could totally do it.  We just need some crystals, man."

I'm not sure exactly what happened after that, because we don't have any lightsabers, but we do have these incredibly awesome lives where we get to work and learn and make things and meet people who do the same things and different things.  We live in different cities and have totally different lives but we have a lot of really awesome things in common and it's really cool to have a good friend grow in a craft with you, especially if they knew you before something that's such a huge part of your life now was just a potentiality.

One thing we worked on together a little bit this summer was hearth melting.  He recently embarked on a journey across the vast United States where he stayed with such bladesmithing luminaries as Dave Delagardelle of Cedarlore Forge and Jeff Pringle, learning and making and doing travelly things.  After that he spent five months in Australia and New Zealand, sailing and cliff-adventuring, battling giant spiders and learning the sand-smelty ways of a smith named Anton A., and brought his knowledge back to the New England for further experimentation. 

So, this past summer, we built a few small melting furnaces from bricks, ground clay/mud, and some fibrous plants.  For air we used a small shop-vac on the blow setting and a tuyere of 1" black pipe.  For fuel we used hardwood charcoal.  Our only real process references were Jack's teachings from Anton, my observation of Jesus Hernandez's hearth melts in Baltimore in March, and online tutorials by Zeb Deming and Lee Sauder.  We had, of course, plenty of steel scrap to melt, mostly mild steel cutoffs and railroad spikes, and were more or less going for blade steel, so we positioned the tuyere as best we could imagine would foster the correct reducing atmosphere to allow the nearly-molten steel to absorb carbon from the charcoal.

Contoocook River bog iron

We were working on this in the town we grew up, where I'd also like to say that we found some pretty good chunks of what's definitely bog iron in the river about a tenth of a mile from my dad's house.  We didn't use it as we weren't doing a direct-reduction bloomery smelt, but we'll use it for that eventually, especially considering that bog iron is the most historically-corroborated Scandinavian Iron Age source of iron ore. 

Our first run was pretty inconclusive due to a bad tuyere height, so the right part of the furnace failed to meet the right temperature.  We fixed that on the next couple of runs and came up with several very solid, dense remelt pucks, which we compacted with a sledge on a stump and split up to bring back to our respective shops down south in Mass.

Me standing on our third stack

One of the awesome things about hearth melting is that it's a completely historical process, using simple technology to achieve fascinating ends.  It's absolutely essential to consider in thinking about pre-industrial steelmaking and blade production, because it allows the recycling of scraps which were once much more valuable and scarce than they are now.

The other incredibly cool thing is that its product is entirely indistinguishable from bloomery material.  Hearth-melted steel, heated with charcoal and air in a stack of organic matter, is going to be exactly the same as anything made in an iron-age furnace.  It's an easy way to practice the working of period material without the humongous learning curve of direct-reduction bloomery smelting from ore. 

Dense hearth puck and old NH-made wrought/steel axe

Here is a photograph of our second hearth-puck which we split to experiment with individually.  Like I said, it was very solid for its size, which was a great thing to feel.  It's about five inches in diameter and 1.5" thick, shown here next to a #2 Underhill Tool Co. wrought iron splitting axe with a welded-in high-carbon bit, made in Nashua, New Hampshire sometime between 1850 and 1890.  It was a pretty awesome find Jack made at our local flea market.  Because of the connection and obvious awesomeness of the axe, Jack has called his bladesmithing enterprise Underhill Edge Sword Co.  Below is a sword blade of his inspired by the ambiguously Roman or Germanic pattern-welded spathae, probably from the 4th century, discovered in the Nydam Mose bog burial in Denmark.  It features what's called a 'piled' high-contrast core and stacked san-mai edges of steel in wrought iron jackets.  Pretty badass and authentic. 

And, as I promised, some tantalizingly coy model shots with the irresistible axe:

 

Fierce.  

For those of you who can't get enough, here's one more: